From: Steve Gibbons <steve@aztech.net>
Date: Wed, 3 Jan 1996 20:11:53 +0800
To: jimbell@pacifier.com
Subject: Re: Guerilla Internet Service Providers (fwd)
Message-ID: <0099BCED.4820A3A0.346@aztech.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


In Article: <m0tXAsV-00090IC@pacifier.com>, jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com> wrote:

# It seems to me that phone line costs are turning into a floor price for
# Internet access, when they shouldn't really be.  The main asset telephone
# companies have, right now, is in RIGHTS OF WAY.  Put an ISP in a business
# park that allows you to run  your own dedicated copper pairs, and you've
# bypassed $25/month/line business phone line charges. 

# At some point, individual urban and suburban blocks could easily be
# "guerilla re-wired" for ISP access without serious trenching, etc.  The
# phoneco would still be involved, but in a far lower-profit mode, as the
# supplier of a single T1 to a multi-block area.  

I had a similar thought about a month ago.  In particular, I was thinking that
skyrise office buildings would be a great market for ISPs to target.  Rent a
closet in the basement/top floor close to the telco demarc.  Run lots of UTP to 
the cients through the existing conduit, ceiling acces, air ducts, or whatever
and boom, lots  of clients, low overhead, telco bills cut to 1/2 of the
competitions'.  Up-front costs might (or might not be) higher, since the wire
installation would now be the burden of the ISP.

ObCrypto: Wiring overhead could be reduced if the building network was moved
away from a star configuration to something closer to a backbone with multiple
physical subnets (say, per floor.)  How do you keep your next door neighbor
from sniffing your traffic on the same subnet?  Encrypt it, silly...  For
performance reasons, truly local traffic could be in the clear, but traffic
between the clients' routers and the ISP's would run through something that
could keep up with the ISP's max throughput on the ISP's outside interface.

You might read "Firewall with encrypted tunnels" for "router" in the paragraph
above.  If you do, then you have the infrastructure for supporting "secure"
trans-Internet traffic.

Of course we're not talking about $25.00/mo. service with a $50.00 setup 
anymore, but low-ish priced, "secure" 56Kb/s, fractional T1, T1, and even T3
seem to be where corporate America/Earth wants to go.

FWIW, (and if anyone winds up doing something like this, I want a "finders
fee" ;-) )

--
Steve@AZTech.Net